Henry Woodd Nevinson

“ Tilak’s address during the Shivaji Festival in Poona, June, 1907:—
“It is true that what we seek may seem like a revolution; it is a revolution in the sense that it means a complete change in the theory of the government of India as now put forward by the bureaucracy. It is true that this revolution must be a bloodless revolution, but it would be a folly to suppose that if there is to be no shedding of blood, there are also to be no sufferings to be undergone by the people. These sufferings must be great. You can win nothing unless you are prepared to suffer. ”

“ Our disregard of all the public protests against the Partition of Bengal and all the persistent appeals for its withdrawal; our disregard of the reasonable pleading of such men as Mr. Gokhale and Dr. Rash Behari Ghose in the Viceroy’s Council, have perhaps done more than anything else to discredit the methods of the old Congress. I do not mean that the Congress has been useless. It served as a training ground for political knowledge. It afforded a centre for the growing unity of India, and without it the leaders of Indian reform could hardly have formulated their own programme. ”

“ In a single moment the whole nation rose, the whole nation lifted itself out of despair, and it was by this sudden awakening from a dream that Bengal found the way of salvation, and declared to all India that eternal life, immortality, not lasting degradation, was our fate....
“There came a time, after the first outbreak of triumphant hope, when all the material forces that could be brought to bear against Nationalism were gradually brought into play, and the question was asked of Bengal, ‘Can you suffer? Can you survive?’ The young men of Bengal were now called upon to suffer. ”

“ Many, like myself, have gone with the crowding pilgrims on festival Sundays or weekday evenings and watched the people bathing in the turbid water, and the Brahmans seated in the open portico reading aloud the wanderings of Rama and breaking into song at the impassioned parts. Or we have stood at the narrow entrance till the door of the inmost shrine should open, allowing a glimpse of the goddess herself, the Bengal Mother, symbolic of the strange Force in nature, always moving irresistibly on its way with life and death, blessing and damnation in its hands. ”

“ But, after all, it is only an Englishman whose first thought is of sanitation when he approaches the divine presence, and the British missionaries who first told that weary old tale of the car were as incapable of understanding the divine passion that, even at the cost of life, yearns for union with eternal powers, as they would have been of understanding the passion of a woman whose grandson described to me how, with proud bearing and joyful face, she walked from her chamber and sat down in the midst of the flames beside her husband’s body till their ashes lay indistinguishably commingled. ”

“ The taunt of cowardice is like one of those prophecies that fulfil themselves. It implants the cowardice that it derides, and if you call a people timid they begin to shake. Ever since Macaulay wrote, the Anglo-Indians had been brought up by their schools and coaches to regard the Bengalis as the cowards of the world, and what was far worse, the educated Bengalis had been taught to regard themselves as the cowards of the world too, just because Macaulay had delighted himself one morning with a brilliant passage of rhetoric. ”

“ Every act of injustice on our part, and every attempt at political suppression, have only promoted India’s sense of unity and hastened her progress in self-reliance. If injustice and suppression continue, their effect will be the same. Whatever course our action may now take, the new spirit has already breathed a fresh life into large classes of the Indian peoples, and it will continue to afford a high motive for self-devotion, and for the moral courage and love of freedom in which the Indian character has hitherto been lacking. ”

“ In hotels, clubs, bungalows, and official chambers, the people of the country, and especially the educated classes, are treated with an habitual contumely more exasperating than savage persecution. I gladly admit that in every part of India I found Englishmen who still retained the courtesy and sensitiveness of ordinary good manners. But one’s mere delight in finding them proved their rarity. Anglo-Indians tell us constantly that our first thought must be to maintain our national prestige, and if arrogance will do it, our prestige is safe. ”

“ Possessing no personal knowledge of the people of this country, and overwhelmed with a sense of the vast responsibilities of his office, he has allowed his vision to be obscured, and his sense of proportion to be warped. From time to time he has let fall ominous hints in the House of Commons, and more than once he has spoken as though some great trouble were brewing in India and the country were on the eve of a dark disaster. ”

“ Where are the political Sanyasis (wandering friars) whose sole work in life would be the preaching of the gospel of freedom? Were are the Vaishyas of the movement who will make money only for the struggle: who will live poorly and modestly and save every farthing for the sacred cause?... Where are the people who will raise agitation for political rights and liberty to the dignity of a Church and will live and die for the same?” [66]
He believed that the only way to win the consideration of England for reforms was to prove the determination and self-reliance of the Indians themselves. ”

“ If any one chooses to say that equality is like Juggernath’s Car, crushing everything equally flat, he is welcome to his little jest. But as I saw the white-robed pilgrims passing into the temple, there to partake of equality’s sacrament, I knew that these outward things were but the symbols of an invisible worship, which may renew the face of the Indian people, and save ourselves from a threatening and dishonourable danger. ”

“ Viceroy lives in winter, and the dull streets of English shops where they sell things that are not quite good enough for England or quite bad enough for the Colonies; enter the squalid chaos of the Indian city, so ordinary and colourless compared to Bombay or Madras; pass through mile after mile of crowded bazaars, and teeming slums, and factories jumbled up with temples;—till at last the buildings begin, as it were, to shake themselves loose, green reappears, and when you come upon the river on your left, it looks almost clean and holy ”

“ But we do not care what happens to ourselves. We are devoted absolutely and without reservation to the cause of the Indian peoples. To imprison even 3000 or 4000 of us at the same time would embarrass the bureaucracy. That is our object—to attract the attention of England to our wrongs by diverting trade and obstructing the Government. Without in the least intending it, England has promoted the idea of Indian unity—by railways, by education, and the use of a common official language. ”

“ It is to doubt the irresistible force of moral power in the affairs of nations. We may be baffled for a time, our efforts may be abortive, but I have faith in the justice of our cause, faith in your patriotism, in the English nation, and in the sword of the avenging angel. Let us then work, not in sorrow or despondency, but in the joyful assurance that our cause will triumph and our country take her rightful place in the Federation of the Empire. ”

“ Throughout India we are witnessing the birth of a new national consciousness, and with it comes a revival of dignity, a resolve no longer to take insults lying down, not to lick the hand that strikes, or rub the forehead in the dust before any human being, simply because he wears a helmet and is called white. Like pilgrims bound for the shrine of Juggernath in an ecstasy of devotion, the leaders of India are inspired by that longing for equality which is always springing afresh in human minds. ”

“ To me it seems a far more serious matter that the irrigation, which is often so lucrative, both to the peasant and the Government, should be accompanied by increase of fever. But whatever evil may arise in India, from a cesspool to a famine, is put down to the Government, as always happens when the people have no control over its powers and no experience of every Government’s limitations. ”

“ There is something about espionage that stirs indignation more deeply than anything else in the world. But I do not wish to part from that land of great rivers with a mere feeling of bitterness. When I recall the quiet circuit of streams by which I slowly passed from Khulna to Barisal, and on to Dacca; and from Dacca through Mymensingh and Jamalpur and Serajganj and Goalundo, where the Ganges and Brahmaputra are joined, to Faridpur, where trains run back to Calcutta,—I lose the sense of bitterness, though there was plenty in the country. ”

“ Rightly or wrongly, we shall retain it, unless we are so overwhelmingly defeated at home that we almost cease to be not only an empire but a nation. Probably it is to our own advantage to retain it, because to withdraw before India is strong enough to stand alone would degrade our national life with a cowardly sense of failure. Personally I think it is to India’s advantage also, because her peoples are so unarmed, undrilled, and unorganized under our rule that if we withdrew our place would easily be taken within a year by Russia, Germany, or Japan ”

“ All these obvious and external causes of complaint, crowded into the space of very few years, have been sapping India’s confidence in the justice of our rule and the benevolence of our people. Indians have, no doubt, exaggerated both the injustice and the malevolence. They have taken a few flagrant cases of injustice as typical of our Courts; they have mistaken for malevolence what is only our reckless indifference to far-off responsibilities. But we cannot wonder at their mistakes. Nearly every one generalizes about foreign nations from the one or two specimens he knows ”

“ There is no part of India where the anti-English feeling was less to be expected than in Madras. Here the Hindu is seen at his mildest, here he asks least of this fleeting world, and accepts destiny with the gentlest quietude. If ever there was a country easy to govern, it should be Southern India; and in time past no part of India has surrendered itself more unreservedly to British rule or trusted more confidently to British justice. Much of this friendliness has been due to the influence of our missionaries, represented by some very remarkable men in Madras. ”

“ In all this he had been aided by the encouragement and example of his Maharani, who had stood by his side like one of the heroic queens of Mahratta history. In all India I suppose there was not another man and woman who had done more for the happiness and advancement of their people, or done more to disprove the common Anglo-Indian charge that Indians are incapable of carrying out even their own reforms. ”

“ Far worse than the mere annoyance involved is the indignant contempt which our Government thus stores up against itself. Every now and then by such means it may discover the trail of some seditious movement. But the discovery of all the sedition in India would not be worth the loss of reputation to which we expose ourselves by resorting to methods that would exclude a man from any club in our country. ”

“ By nature averse from politics, he devoted himself to those deeper questions which lie beyond the touch of governments good or bad, and it was not till he was forty that the decisive change came. It is true that he joined the Congress movement in 1888, within two or three years of its beginning; but no one has more severely criticized the Congress and its methods—its unwieldy size, its holiday aspect, its failure to touch the poverty and ignorance of India, and its mistaken confidence in the power of speeches and resolutions for the redress of political wrongs. ”